Is this really summer? The people of the city rush through any scattering of fine days impatient for the season to reach its height. When time stretches out hot and dry, and we have what we wanted, we grow anxious for change. If such weather persists, the city issues warnings. Teams stationed at major intersections hand out sponsored bottles of water. All this we have come to expect but how do we prepare ourselves now that the sun blazes for a week in November and rain falls from February to June?
When Iris reaches the station she keeps walking, south through the crescents and squares towards the river. These streets are lit differently. Discreet pools of lamplight seem to shy away from the houses. Iris doesn’t belong here. Ordinarily she would despise the locked communal gardens and silky cars. But tonight it’s somewhere that’s letting her pass unnoticed.
She will not think of this evening’s encounter but her body is full of it and what she will not say, even to herself, is being processed in slow detonation. As long as she puts no words to it, she can allow herself to feel this pleasurable shock. It is not something we get to decide on or choose. It’s body and memory working in a way that makes it impossible to tell one from the other. At twenty-six Iris would have held on or let go without equivocation. Even at thirty-six, that part of her was regularly woken. But she is forty-six and this encounter feels so unfamiliar that she is like herself at sixteen.
When she gets home her husband has already put on his coat. They stand on the doorstep and make arrangements for the coming week. There’s nothing more to say but David makes no move to leave.
So, he says.
So?
She knows what he’s talking about.
You said you’d decide.
Did I.
He reaches out his hand and she flinches.
For fuck’s sake, Iris.
That morning she’d been woken at five by her daughters and for once saw them as what they were: ten and almost twelve years old and stretched to the limits of childhood.
Dad’s not well, said Lou.
Since the separation Lou has assumed charge of whatever she can and Kate has become her shadow.
Your father’s tired, Iris replied. We all are. What the hell time is this?
Kate’s face was pleading with her mother not to be cross.
It’s morning, technically, said Lou. And I was asleep, technically.
Lou’s voice was getting more emphatic.
He might have an episode.
What makes you think that?
He told us, rushed out Kate. He was cooking our pasta and he had to lie down so we—
Lou jabbed her with an elbow.
What did he say? Iris asked.
Kate was shaking her head so theatrically that Iris smiled.
It’s not funny! Lou screamed it, really screamed.
Iris took her in her arms while Kate did her best to hold them both and said the things that Iris would usually say, which sounded so bleak and fake that Iris couldn’t stand to hear them.
The situation simplified into her daughters’ pain and what she could do to relieve it. She struggled with sleepless children, violent mornings, the lists and costs and machinery of life, which she now had to keep up with on her own. The house was falling down. The house would have to be sold. David couldn’t go on living in his sister’s spare room forever. But that was this morning and since then she’s been reminded of something.
David is still standing on the doorstep.
Iris. You said you’d decide.
It occurs to her that they’ve started using each other’s names. As if pushing each other away. She’s heard the girls, up in their room, referring to them as David and Iris too. Is that what the children are doing? Pushing these troublesome parents away? She finds something to say.
The girls said you weren’t well.
He shrugs and straightens up.
Nothing to worry about.
She knows he doesn’t mean this but takes hold of it anyway.
That’s good. It might be helpful if you reassured them.
What he feels now – the coldness of his wife, the loneliness of his illness, the severance from his daughters – moves so powerfully through him that he shudders. He reinforces his voice and is trying to think of something conciliatory to say when he notices. Her force is all inward. She is caught up.
Who are you fucking? He’s grinning now so as not to cry.
Iris backs away. It’s as if he watched her walk home, her body blaring excitement. It was obvious, wasn’t it? She’s become one of those women – giddy, flattered, thrown off course. The thrill running through her as if she were thirty-six, twenty-six, sixteen. And so she says what she says out of wanting to conceal this ridiculous self.
Not you, David.
He grabs at her as she pushes him out of the door and slams it shut. He bangs and shouts.
Who is he? Who is he?
When she looks up she sees her daughters on the landing. The next second they’re not there. Did she invoke them to make her open the door and take him back?
The hall is quiet. David has gone. She sits on the stairs.
the bone skates
When Raif asked what she was working on, Iris told him about the bone skates recently excavated on the edge of the old city and thought to be almost a thousand years old. This morning’s task is to assess them. She puts on gloves before lifting out each flat, narrow object. Eroded and compressed, they’re still porous enough to absorb the slightest amount of grease from her fingers. She works in a room without windows but even this air is rich enough to cause harm.
Would it be harm or just more change? After all, the skates have been made and used and lost. They disappeared into centuries of clay and ice only to surface when the bulldozers started to claw away layers of the city in preparation for the new rail line which will run from east to west.
The skate Iris has selected for display is dark brown. It’s a horse’s cannon bone, the long bone beneath the knee. Compacted by the press of the body and worn down by the ice, it has lost its natural coarseness and taken on the polished grain of wood. The only evidence that it is a skate is the drilled holes through which a leather thong would have been threaded.
Her job is to fix things as they have been named. A museum object must communicate itself and so the skate will be put in place as a skate, not as part of a horse, or as bone, although all that will be explained in its caption. Iris has been trained to protect objects and to strengthen them without alteration while remaining aware that, in practice, this is something that cannot be done.
A thousand years ago the east wall of the city was met by a waterlogged moor. When it froze over in winter, young men would polish the shinbones of cattle, tie them to their feet and play upon the yce. Further north this wasn’t play but the only way to travel. A long narrow lake which had been dark water all summer froze over and became a way to fly through the forest. Some tye bones to their feete, and under their heeles, and shoving themselves by a little picked staffe, doe slide as swiftly as a birde flyeth in the aire, or an arrow out of a crossbow.
Like many of the objects that interest Iris most, these skates are not attractive. Bone, which looks so rosy and lithe when cut from the body, dries into something coarse and dull. Is it animal? Mineral? The thing we’re strung upon is the part of us that appears least alive.
the only thing to do
When they meet for the third time, Raif will tell Iris that he has a broken heart. He is telling the truth – his heart finds it difficult to cohere. He will never know what it was about Liis that made his heart become a single solid part of him but that was her effect. He married her in order to save her but he would have married her anyway because he was in love.
Raif had been finishing his PhD. He was tense with sexual ambition that alarmed his otherwise cautious nature. Women started to pursue him and he allowed things to happen. If someone flirted he flirted back, and as he did not know how to calibrate this, he got into trouble
. Relationships appeared to form without his having decided anything and ended the same way. He was helping at a conference at his university when he first saw Liis. She stood out because she was dressed like the company executive that it turned out she was.
Raif’s experience has been that life, people and feelings surge and recede. It is in his nature to wait. Sooner or later a surface forms and he moves across it without much thought as to direction or consequence. But he rushed towards Liis. A series of meetings followed which he orchestrated as if they were stages in a ceremony. He felt as if he were skating madly on a frozen lake – leaps, reversals, figures of eight – which wasn’t a bad feeling because, unbelievably, he could!
She was an American who turned out to be Estonian and whose English was extremely clear but left no residue. He rarely felt as if he’d gleaned or grasped anything from their conversations and he found this a relief. On the first night they spent together, he led her back to his tiny student room. She undressed and got into bed. He did the same. When it grew light he drew back the covers. She placed his hands where she wanted them to be and indicated what she required of him. He had never concentrated like this, never really looked. He stared at her perfect surfaces till she made a small sound and pulled him towards her.
Afterwards, he took his clothes into the bathroom, got dressed and waited in the corridor for her to appear. He couldn’t afford to buy her breakfast in a cafe so he made tea and toast and, even though it was February, suggested they carry it outside and sit on a bench on the scrubby grass opposite. He wanted even breakfast to be an occasion. This was where Liis told him about New York.
Her father had been a diplomat during the Soviet era, high up and trusted to travel. When she was eighteen he’d asked permission to take her with him on a trip to New York. New York! Liis recalled the amazement she felt at the marble of the hotel foyer, the wrapped soaps, the towels, the elevator to the thirty-fifth floor, the colour and variety and quantity of everything. On the last day of her visit, when they were in the lobby and about to get a cab to the airport, her father turned to her and said that he was going to defect. She could go home and denounce him or she could stay in New York. She had a minute to decide.
At this point in the story Liis broke off, leaving Raif hunting for a response. He knew no one whose life had involved anything on this scale. Was this a good or a bad thing for a father to have done? He offered something non-committal.
You stayed, I guess. Of course. I mean—
She was staring straight ahead, not looking at him or the trees or the sky or anything.
Of course.
What about your mother?
Liis shook her head.
Did you see her again?
Last summer. People were starting to go back and I thought—
What about your father? Did he go back with you?
He’s dead.
So what happened last summer?
I saw my mother.
There was no emotion in her voice or tension in her body but he felt compelled to comfort her. He reached out and touched the back of her hand with the tips of his fingers.
Are you cold? he asked.
Not really.
But she shivered and pulled his arm around her.
He held her as tentatively as he always would in the years to come. They continued to sit on the bench for some time while Raif wondered what to say next and then realised he wasn’t expected to say anything. How restful! He finished her story for himself, projecting onto the blankness of her lovely face all he could conjure of this drama.
A teenager in a hotel lobby trying to choose a future. Life narrowing to a point at which you have to act. Such moments take us into a simple world of large gestures where the stakes are high and the dangers clear. Liis grew brighter and brighter. No wonder Raif fell in love.
*
A year after their wedding he’d been sitting with some students in a pub. One was talking about a trip he’d made to Estonia.
People got caught up in ways we can’t imagine. Occupation by one side and then the other. The Soviet years. Unbelievable stories. I met this woman who had just come back for the first time since she was eighteen. Her father had been this high-up diplomat, completely trusted, and he’d gone to New York. He’d got permission to take one of his children with him.
When was this? asked Raif.
I don’t know – the late eighties?
I mean when did you meet her?
When I was there last year. She and her husband were staying in the same hotel. A lovely woman but you could tell really sad …
Raif sat up very straight.
My wife is Estonian and she—
His voice had tightened and he was gripping his chair. Something was about to crash in and sweep him away. The boy who was talking barely looked up from his beer.
Your wife? Really? They’re beautiful people but quite sad, right? Anyway, this woman, she was only eighteen, goes off to New York with her father, has a whale of a time—
I’ve heard this story before, said one of the others. Doesn’t he defect?
That’s right! I suppose she’s famous or something.
What was her name? asked Raif.
Anja something. Anyway, on the last day of their trip they were waiting for the taxi to take them to the airport …
Raif would say nothing of this. He went home and lay down beside his wife as if he were lying down on the surface of the frozen lake over which he’d skated for so long.
a failed instrument
Iris is old enough to know that decisions, like the emotions behind them, have many components. It’s a question of bringing things into balance, which is something she’s good at. It is in her nature to be methodical, cautious and detached. Yet an encounter with a stranger has stopped her seeing through the decision she’d made to repair her family. While she hates to think she could be so easily redirected, she knows that meeting Raif is connected to how she now feels, which is in many small ways more ambitious and alive.
It’s a dull weekend and her daughters are fractious. Everything they used to enjoy is boring. Iris wants to work on a report but she needs documents that she’s left in the museum stores, a building to the far west of the city where she works part of most weeks.
The girls are slumped at either end of the sofa, sporadically kicking each other. Iris pushes herself between them.
Do you want to come into work with me?
She looks at Kate who looks at Lou who slumps further before she replies.
To see stuff? We’ve done that.
Kate strives to sound as weary as her sister.
We’ve seen everything.
You haven’t seen where I work in the stores.
What’s so interesting about the stores?
There are three times as many objects there as in the museum.
Lou considers this and then something occurs to her.
The stores – they’re private, right?
Well, yes, in that the public don’t have access.
So it’s like a special area, where normal people can’t go?
Yes. You need a special pass and special permission.
OK, then.
Bring your coats.
It’s summer.
Bring your coats.
Lou and Kate have lived all their lives in the city and like everyone they know less of it than they think. They have their routes and destinations and take little notice of what lies between. There is the standard map of the city with its attractions and shops and monuments and the areas that everyone’s heard of. And then there is a subtler map of places whose names are not so widely known and whose location most would find hard to define. These tend to be where the city is unsure of itself, where nothing is what it seems and where one thing abrades or opposes another and nothing coheres. It is in such a place that Lou and Kate now find themselves, and they are uncertain and intrigued.
The stores are located in a rambling building which w
as originally the headquarters of the national savings bank. At the turn of the twentieth century four thousand people sat here in rows, men and women in segregation, processing a hundred thousand items of correspondence a day. This was a place designed for people engaged in an abstract activity: the movement of money. Now it’s almost empty of people and full of things.
Lou assesses the sooty brick, tired drainpipes and dingy foyer with a sharp up-and-down sweep of her eyes. This is how she is learning to manage any new encounter. You look at someone as if there’s something wrong with them before they can look that way at you.
This doesn’t look like stores, she says.
Kate takes her mother’s hand as if Iris is the one who needs reassuring.
Mamma, she says. Can we see something now?
They follow Iris up stairs and along corridors. The warmth of the day drops away and they slip into their coats. They might be in a church, a hospital or a prison. There aren’t many windows.
I don’t like this air, says Kate. It’s old.
Well this is a place full of old things, says Iris.
She starts their tour with a room full of votive objects. There are rows of clay wombs and phalluses, and rough figures with swollen bellies. The girls move solemnly from one case to the next, going through the act of looking, but these things are too small and vague to interest them.
Why aren’t they arranged? asks Lou.
Because they’re not on display.
The girls are used to museums as places where objects are either out of reach, behind glass or put into your hands. Here they move carefully and keep their distance. Kate sees a look on Iris’s face that she thinks is disappointment.
Which is your favourite thing? she asks.
In the stores, objects are labelled only by number. The magic of investment takes place in the museum galleries. Visitors stare at a lump of clay because a caption tells them how rare and important it is – where it was found, how long ago and what powers it has. Iris wishes people could experience the unlabelled object first: see it as a lump of clay and only after that as a way of reading the future.
In the City of Love's Sleep Page 2
